Health CAT by Abigail JAMES

Why do we need to eat food and maintain a balanced diet, and how does it impact our health?

ahjam2 — 2025-09-12 00:20:55 UTC

Eating a well balanced diet is essential for the human body for many reasons. It boosts one's immune system, ensures the maintenance of a healthy weight, and reduces the risk of illnesses like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Food also helps our mental health stay strong, helping our mood and cognitive function, and improving our concentration when our diet is filled with fruits, vegetables and whole grains. If our diet was unbalanced, you would be in severe malnutrition, you would be at risk of many chronic diseases, and you’d be more prone to depression and anxiety. We need to eat food because it provides us with essential micro and macro nutrients that fuel our bodies. Without food, our bodies wouldn’t have everything they need to properly function throughout the day. We would be in deficit of several things, like sodium, which regulates our blood pressure and aids our nerve impulse and fluid balance, calcium, which builds strong bones and teeth, and supports heart and muscle health, and iron, which is an important component of hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that takes oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body.

What are the food groups, and what's in them?

ahjam2 — 2025-09-12 00:23:29 UTC

To ensure we eat a balanced diet and gain all the benefits from it, we must eat a certain amount of foods from each food group. The food groups are: Fruit, grains, vegetables, dairy, and lean meats, poultry, tofu, eggs, nuts, fish and seeds. In order to eat enough of these foods, you can eat an apple, a banana, or a pear for fruit, bread, cereal, or pasta for grains, broccoli, carrot, or cauliflower for vegetables, milk, yoghurt or ice cream for dairy, and steak, eggs or chicken for lean meats, poultry, tofu, eggs, nuts, fish and seeds.

The importance of the macronutrients when playing tennis

ahjam2 — 2025-09-12 06:53:33 UTC

When playing my favourite sport, tennis, the macronutrients, carbohydrates, protein, and fats, can help boost your performance in many ways. Carbohydrates, which you can get in grains and bread, serve as the body's primary energy source. They help your muscles and brain function throughout sustained movement and focus. Carbohydrates, when enough are consumed, get broken down into glucose, which then gets stored in the body as glycogen in the muscles or liver, which helps your stamina, lasting you through long matches and delaying fatigue. Protein is another macronutrient that assists a tennis player, repairing and rebuilding muscles after they’ve been strained, essentially for recovering between matches and after injuries. A tennis player needs 0.55 to 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day to maintain their performance, but any more than this will not help. One can get this protein from eating fish, chicken, nuts, tofu or eggs. The last macronutrient I’ll be discussing here is fats. Healthy fats can help you in tennis by providing a secondary energy source when you run out of carbohydrates, supporting brain function, maintaining healthy joints, and protecting your organs. You can get sufficient fats from eating avocados, olive oil, soy products, and fatty fish.

A potential meal, containing all three macronutrients!

ahjam2 — 2025-09-12 06:54:06 UTC

A meal that contains all three of these macronutrients is a serving of fettuccine carbonara, with a side of garlic bread. The carbohydrates are found in the fettuccine and the garlic bread, the protein is found in the bacon, and the fats are found in the cheese.

The micronutrients, their function, importance, and food sources!

ahjam2 — 2025-09-12 06:54:53 UTC

Three micronutrients are Iron, Vitamin B9/Folate, and Vitamin C. Iron is important to health and wellbeing as it lets red blood cells carry oxygen to the rest of the body. It boosts your energy levels, immune system and physical performance, reducing fatigue and weariness. You can get iron through eating foods like red meat, poultry, seafood, spinach, and lentils. Vitamin B9/Folate, another micronutrient, is also important to your health and wellbeing. It forms red blood cells, allows cells to divide and grow properly, and you can get it through eating foods like dark leafy green vegetables - for example, spinach and broccoli - legumes, and citrus fruits. Vitamin C, the last micronutrient I’ll be discussing, helps grow and repair tissue, form healthy skin, bones, and blood vessels, and supports wound healing. It protects cells from damage, and lets the body absorb iron, especially from plants and plant based food. You can find it in oranges, kiwi, strawberries, and citrus fruits in general.

Sugar: A potentially harmful risk nutrient!

ahjam2 — 2025-09-12 06:55:33 UTC

While all nutrients do good things for your body, there are a particular few that can be very dangerous when overconsumed. One of these is sugar. Sugar does many good things, like providing the body with energy, especially the brain, but it can also be harmful. Overconsumption of sugar can lead to obesity, diabetes, uncontrollable mood swings, and potential heart disease. However, while you must be careful of not eating too much sugar, eating too little can cause intense cravings, irritability, anxiety, and general shakiness.

The Health Star Rating System

ahjam2 — 2025-09-13 09:43:34 UTC

Purpose: The Health Star Rating aims to be completely transparent with consumers, showing them exactly which product out of a range is healthiest. It wants to help consumers be as healthy as possible within different facets of their diets, giving an easy to understand graphic that makes healthier eating choices easily accessible and comprehensible.

How the Information is Presented: The visuals in the health star rating system shows a semi-circle with stars in it, with an amount of stars being filled in that correlates to how healthy a product is. The more stars there are, the healthier the item, making 5 stars the healthiest and 0.5/½ the most unhealthy. The visual labelling helps to promote healthy eating as it is always front and centre on the packaging, easy to notice and take into account to improve your diet.

How the Foods Are Rated: This system rates the healthiness of a product based on how much of certain nutrients it contains. The Health Star Rating system considers the amount of energy, saturated fats, sodium, sugar and fibre something contains, and lists if that amount is high or low. These high and low ratings help people to know what is and isn’t a lot of a nutrient, as that isn’t super common knowledge, and it is easy for companies to trick consumers into believing a large amount of something is actually a small amount, by not telling you how much of it someone typically needs in a day.

A Strength: One strength that the Health Star Rating System has its ability to help you pick the healthiest option in one category of food. If you were planning to make a meal that required a certain food item, like a sauce in a pasta dish, but you wanted to make the dish as healthy as possible while still adhering to those constraints, the Health Star Rating system could help you compare two brands of the sauce to see the healthiest option.

A Limitation: One limitation that comes with the Health Star Rating System is the fact that the labels can be slightly confusing at times, as it doesn’t explicitly state in the visual that the rating is only within that food category. This means that you could look at one item that’s rated 5 stars within its category, and think that means it’s a super healthy item overall, when really it could contain more sugar or sodium than something rated 3 stars in a different food category, and only be healthy when compared to items in its own category.